Acceptable losses

The 739 people killed by Chicago's 1995 heat wave were the victims of a mayor who believed in running his city like a business.

By Charles Taylor

Aug 20, 2002 | What does it take for people to take the dangers of hot weather seriously? To recognize it as a killer? Heat kills more people in America than all other natural disasters -- tornadoes, floods, earthquakes -- combined. Yet we still treat heat waves as if they were an inconvenience.

Compare the tone of your local newscasters when a heat wave is about to descend and when a blizzard is about to hit. In the latter, you're likely to hear, "The region is bracing for a major winter storm which could paralyze commuters ..." But the former is more likely to produce something like "It's a hot one out there, so head for the beach or turn on the air conditioner." Meteorologists usually warn asthmatics or heart patients if the air quality is "unhealthful," but programming is never interrupted in heat waves the way it is for a hurricane or a winter nor'easter.

There are almost no program breaks for heat advisories the way there are even for severe thunderstorms. In the midst of brutally cold winter weather, no one would ever argue that heating people's homes is a luxury. But during extended periods of hot, humid weather, when the very acts of walking and breathing become not just a misery but unhealthy, when for some people the mildest exertion risks hospitalization or even death, we still talk about those "lucky enough" to have air conditioning as if air conditioning were a luxury.

It's different in places like the tropics or the Middle East, where people are used to the constant fact of extreme heat and have found ways to cope with it. In America, despite the effects of global warming, heat waves are still a break from the norm. I suspect that heat waves trigger a response that's deep in the American character, the impulse to stop complaining, buck up and get on with things. How, though, can ordinary life go on when people are forced to live in meteorological conditions so perilous that they begin breaking the body down after 48 hours of exposure?

And since we largely judge the destructiveness of a natural disaster in terms of media images, how can a heat wave -- which does not lay obvious waste to the concrete, physical environment -- compete with the damage left behind by hurricanes or tornadoes, earthquakes or floods, even the transformation of the landscape that happens in a snowstorm? Streets aren't impassable, buildings aren't falling down, you can still get from one place to another. What's the big deal?

Getting us to think seriously about heat is just one of the aims of Eric Klinenberg's trenchant and persuasive new book "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago." The disaster that Klinenberg, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, refers to is the heat wave that laid waste to Chicago for eight days in July 1995. Higher temperatures in the upper atmosphere trapped humid air in the city, leaving it no place to dissipate.

The heat index (how hot it feels to your body -- the heat equivalent of the wind-chill factor) hit 126 degrees (indoors, the actual temperature -- not the index -- hit 120). The physical damage -- buckled pavement, bridges that had to be hosed down to prevent them from locking when plates expanded, cars that broke down in the street, a power generator that burst into flame, the loss of water pressure and even water to some neighborhoods where kids had opened fire hydrants -- was nothing next to the human toll. By the time the heat wave lifted, 739 Chicagoans had died.

We're not talking about an era before air conditioning. We're talking about a modern American city, seven years ago. To put this in perspective, Klinenberg tells us that that's more than twice the number who died in the great Chicago fire of 1871, and more than 20 times the number who died in Hurricane Andrew. And it tops the casualties of the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 combined.

In terms of lives lost, the 1995 Chicago heat wave was one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in recent American history. Yet how many of you outside of Chicago have even heard of it? I certainly hadn't before reading Klinenberg's book. And part of the reason for that lies in the way we think about heat, a line of thinking reflected in the judgment of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and many of his city officials that the heat wave was an act of God, and that the deaths were unavoidable. However, an even more ominous attitude than simple complacency about hot weather was in effect during the deadly '95 heat wave: It was a classic case of how deciding to run a city like a corporation can put citizens' lives in danger.

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